Talk about video games, movies, music, news, and technology without wading through a thousand dumb kids and dozen exclamation points after each sentence. Try it out for a few days and remember what it's like to breathe Internet air without getting two lungs full of stupid.

Sonic Chaos was my favorite back in the day, followed by Sonic CD. Sonic 2 on GG always pissed me off, mostly because I would always get stuck on a stage that was nothing but springs and spikes with no way to tell where I was going to land.

The Genesis ones were good, but I didn't get into them as much. The first was awesome back then, I don't think I cared much about part 2, Sonic 3 was cool, and I liked the idea of S&K but don't think I got to play it until it was an emulator years later.

The sad thing about garbage games like Sonic 4 is that they make people forget how really excellent the original trilogy was. I see reviews that praised Sonic 4 for living up to the original and gave it a 7/10. Like they recognized it wasn't great, but in their mind they made to that that was how it was supposed to be. That's really sad to me.

Sonic 1. Man. I still remember traveling all the way to Jackson Mississippi for that game. I remember lusting after it for months. I was crazy about robots as a little boy and Sonic was FULL of them. I had to have that game. I needed all those robots in my life.

I remember my mom going shopping while we visited her sister in jackson. I'd finally managed to talk her into going to toysrus and I remember getting the paper slip and going up front for the game. I also remember that I had to wait two days before we went home so I could play it. I went over every page of the manual in those two days.

the game was so good when I finally got to play it. I was hooked after that. I got every sonic on release after that. And I got a sega cd just to play sonic CD. I loved every one of them. Even Sonic R for the saturn. And I got the first 50 sonic comics and watched the cartoons.

Those were the days of gaming for me. Those were the years that I was a "gamer." When the dreamcast failed, and sonic adventure 2 whatever came out, that all ended. I still play games, but that world doesn't have the magic it used to have.

God. I love those old sonic games so much. I also don't know how I feel about Satsuki being better at Sonic 2 than me. I never could get passed the flying fortress. 9 times out of 10, Id fall to me death.

Maybe Sega should "crowdsource" these games and hire up some of the people making these fan tributes (they are all over the Youtubes) so people can be in charge who actually know what the fuck is going on.

It's kind of strange to me that, in this era of farming out games to western developers when their franchises aren't even in decline, Sega is content to sit idly by and let Sonic Team have carte blanche to cheapen the license with shitty game after shitty game. Even if handing an installment or two to western devs didn't turn out to make for a better game, at very least it would give the japanese devs a fucking rest. Sonic games are getting worse when you're cracking the whip on the same people to oversee three of them per year? No shit.

I didn't have a Genesis until way later, but my friends had them. It didn't stop me from getting to regionals on the Blockbuster Video Game Tournaments on a system I didn't own. I was also that jackass kid calling up Babbages and Software ETC to find out if Super Mario RPG or Final Fantasy III came out that day.

I thought Sonic 1 was amazing, the color, the music, the speed, it was truly a breakout game for the Genesis. While the later sequels were better games (especially Sonic CD), none of them has ever made the same impact as the first game. While some of the portable sequels were okay, none of the 3D games are even playable to me. This series is pretty much dead to me.

I was beyond obsessed with Sonic 2 when I was a kid, kind of to the point now where I don't really ever want to play it again. I think it is one of the few games I know inside out. I liked Sonic and Knuckles as well, but Knuckles sort of broke a couple of levels so he was the better character.
I think in Simpsonsesque fashion, the Sonic series has gone on too long and should probably be put to sleep. But I suppose the Sonic name is the only thing making Sega any money at this point,

I too was all in very early with Sonic. I remember selling my 1990 Leaf baseball card set to buy the version of the Genesis with Sonic as a pack-in when it was first released. My dad was pissed at hell at me, because the cards theoretically would continue to appreciate in value, while the games would not. It's ironic as hell that the opposite has happened, though obviously not with something as common as Sonic. I beat the game with all the Chaos Emeralds repeatedly, which was already odd for me by then. I was just about old enough to have a job, so the days of having to play the same games ad nauseum were at an end. But Sonic earned it. In fact, Sonic and ThunderForce III were probably the games I beat most often on the Genesis, if you throw out NHL and Street Fighter II: SCE.

Yeah, it's a good version for the hardware. Commodore's ones are much nicer, though. The VIC-20 version is easily my favourite because it's the only one the runs really smoothly and lets you do more things with your ships movements, i.e. tapping the joystick just right to quickly become stationary or send yourself bouncing back and forth in a straight line.

Oh, another one I noticed as a wiki ripple effect, after I named Alpha Waves and the first 3D platformer in a couple places on wikipedia, I noticed the creator of the game Cristophe De Dinechin embraced the distinction and wrote a lot about it, giving a really detailed behind the scenes account of its creation. I've seen it pop up other places too, but it's obviously not a game that comes up in the mainstream media.

I shouldn't say there has been no progress in the media. I do love how today's media is much more likely to talk about console games and PC games together as both being video games although the rise of multi-format gaming has probably contributed to that. There are other little improvements as well. When I say the media hasn't improved, I'm mostly thinking of recent years and some disturbing trends like the romanticization/fact twisting of Nintendo's past. I think it's inexcusable to have articles/lists nowadays covering '80s gaming and having it pretty much all being NES and maybe a few arcade games. Shouldn't the quality stuff that wasn't as big in sales back then be getting at least a bit more recognition than back in the day instead of even less? Gamers have had over 20 years to catch up on some of the important games they couldn't afford or missed back then. And if they haven't caught up, that's fine. I just don't want those people getting paid to write about older video games.

That wiki example gives me hope for making an impact, though. I should definitely use it more. I have made corrections here and there, and I also sometimes do little things like change the words "US market" to "North American market" or add in Oceania alongside Europe when it applies to help make vocabulary more accurate and inclusionary.

Keep doing what you are doing NZE, I always enjoy reading your posts and opinions on things (unlike most of the tropinions hyberboles, including my own). I would imagine it would be difficult to have a higher standard in videogame journalism, but hey, anyone can start a website/blog so if anyone can do it, it is you.